30 December 2007

Came across this advertisement in my favorite food magazine this month. It's a part of a series of ads that have been running for quite some time now. It's sponsored by Traveloregon.com. Since it's a food magazine the other ads have featured Oregon winemakers, cheesemakers, farmers, and other food-oriented professionals. The skier caught me a little off guard. Then I saw the boots and started making my own connections.

Though it's not stated in the text I like the idea of linking the ancient traditions together. In this case the customs and practices that define a particular group of people. Whether it's winemaking, cheesemaking, or skiing--and more specifically and importantly Telemark skiing--the daily activities and expressions that Oregonians (we're told) engage themselves in act, in effect, to define them. In folkloric terms, this is called a worldview: "the manner in which a culture sees and expresses its relation to the world around it" (Barre Toelken).

Now, perhaps I'm reading way too much into a fairly simple series of advertisements but since the ads have tapped into pretty much everything that I hold near and dear to my heart (save for the always terrific Portland music scene), I'm sold!

My only criticism with the series is that it's fairly northwestern Oregon-centric and I'm more partial to the wide-open spaces, sagebrush, and Ponderosa pine of the eastern side. At any rate, well done Oregon!

A bit of an absence. Yes. The end of the semester turned into family visits that turned into friend visits that turned into the holidays. Oh, the holidays. I tend to disappear during the holiday season. But I'm doggy-paddling my way back and ready to start anew. So grab some Champagne and dig in.

And to welcome me back here is a tasty little treat: LCD Soundsystem's All My Friends. Song of the year? Yes. Song of the last two decades? Quite possibly. It, too, might make you feel like disappearing.

In the Flesh

It is not an unusual life-curve for Westerners--to live in and be shaped by the bigness, sparseness, space, clarity, and hopefulness of the West, to go away for study and enlargement and the perspective that distance and dissatisfaction can give, and then to return to what pleases the sight and enlists the loyalty and demands the commitment. --Wallace Stegner, "Finding the Place: A Migrant Childhood"